The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (47 page)

This wooden structure was only a temporary solution, and about a year after the storm a local architect submitted plans for a more permanent replacement. The remains of the collapsed ramp would be removed, enlarging the open space at the foot of the wall, and the walkway would be replaced by a concrete bridge over the plaza that would take visitors right up to the door.

The only difficulty was that the ramp, like everything else in Jerusalem, was an antiquity. It was known as the Mugrabi path, and a thorough archaeological survey of the site would be required before work could begin. This was another source of delay; but the interim wooden walkway was still in place, and the wall had been standing there for two thousand years. There was plenty of time, it seemed. Then another blizzard in early 2007 raised the specter of further collapse, and the archaeologists were forced to begin on 6 February.

Suddenly things started to move very fast. On 7 February thousands of Palestinians gathered around the ramp to protest against the excavations. The imams threatened an uprising, and the Palestinian
Authority claimed that Israeli bulldozers were trying to undermine the great Al-Aqsa Mosque on the other side of the wall, inside the Noble Sanctuary. Abas Zkoor, an Arab member of the Israeli legislature, supported them: he visited the excavation site and pointed out the remains of a modest medieval mosque buried amid the ruins of the ramp earmarked for removal. There was a riot at Friday prayers, and the police fired rubber bullets into the crowd. On 9 February a crowd in Nazareth waved banners accusing Israel of starting the Third World War.

The prime minister of Israel was forced to make a statement.

The restoration of the Mugrabi path after the place collapsed and was declared a dangerous structure was done in complete coordination with all parties, including foreign countries, relevant Muslim officials, and international bodies. As has been explained, this work is being carried on outside the Temple Mount, and the repairs do not constitute any damage to the Mount or Islamic holy places.

But that didn’t seem to satisfy anyone. Ayatollah Khameini, the religious leader of Iran, thundered, “Islam should show a serious reaction to the Zionist regime’s insult.” The Israeli ambassador in Cairo was given a dressing-down, while Egypt’s parliament discussed whether to rescind its 1979 treaty with Israel. One member of the ruling Egyptian party proclaimed that “nothing will work with Israel except for a nuclear bomb that wipes it out of existence.” King Abdullah of Jordan called on the United States to prevent Israel from continuing the excavations. The president of Turkey sent a group of Islamic archaeologists to inspect the site; they found no wrongdoing but were dismissed by the rest of the Arab world as Zionist patsies. UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, demanded that the excavations cease until it had been able to prepare a report.

A week after the archaeologists had begun, work stopped, and the scheme for the replacement bridge was withdrawn. An Israeli minister suggested that the project be suspended to avoid compromising Israeli interests at an upcoming Middle East peace conference. But once that conference was over, it was back to business as usual. Another plan
for the bridge was submitted, it too was denounced at Friday prayers, rubber bullets were fired once more, and the head of UNESCO had to be called in to mediate. At the time of this writing, the excavation, conservation, alteration—call it what you will—of the Mugrabi path remains incomplete. It’s an insoluble problem for now, but a stalemate cannot be sustained for long. The temporary wooden walkway itself is deteriorating, and all it will take is another storm for the whole structure to collapse.

Still, neither side in the dispute will budge. The wall, and the holy sites on the other side of it, exercise an awesome fascination and power over both of them. For the Jews, the wall is the boundary around the habitation of what they call the Shekinah. The Muslims speak of
Sakina
. It is something for which there is no word in modern English; we used to call it the Glory of the Lord.

I
T’S NOT THE
first time that archaeology has sparked a dispute between Israel and Islam. The Waqf, the Muslim authority that controls the day-to-day affairs of the Noble Sanctuary, has consistently opposed Israeli attempts to excavate the wall that surrounds it.

There is a warren of tunnels running alongside the foundations of the Western Wall, hollowed out by an Israeli archaeological team under the leadership of Benjamin Mazar. They had started by digging at the southern end of the Western Wall, cutting away Ottoman, Mameluke, Crusader, Umayyad, Byzantine, and Roman remains to reveal a paved street running along the base of the Kotel. Both street and wall, they claimed, had been built by King Herod the Great in biblical times.

Farther north, these Herodian remains are buried under the heart of the old city of Jerusalem—the Muslim Quarter. If Mazar’s archaeologists had tried digging from the surface there, they would have provoked the same sort of apocalyptic reaction that later attended the archaeological dig around the Mugrabi path. Instead, they proceeded horizontally along the base of the wall by clearing out one ancient cellar after another, removing tons of rubbish from Roman vaults entombed beneath the Muslim Quarter buildings. The underground passage thus excavated stretches for half a mile or so, until the wall turns at the northwest corner of the Noble Sanctuary.

The Western Wall tunnels, as they are known, are open to the public. To tour them is to map the city from beneath: here and there a hole cut into the vaults overhead indicates the location of a well in a square above, or perhaps a trapdoor into somebody’s house. The gigantic stones of the Kotel appear huger still when discovered in the rat runs that lead from cellar to cellar. Eventually the tour comes to an end. “There is a door out here,” says the guide, “but it’s closed”—she pauses—“for security reasons. You’ll have to go back the way you came.”

The Israeli authorities tried to open the northern exit from the tunnels in 1996, but the inhabitants of the Muslim Quarter erupted in protest at what they saw as an Israeli incursion into their part of the city. Fifteen Israeli soldiers and seventy of their own people were killed in the ensuing riots. Eventually the Israelis reached a deal with the Waqf. They would be allowed to open their door during daylight hours, and in return the Waqf would be granted permission to create a new mosque in the Haram.

The Waqf sent in the bulldozers, and by 2000 some six thousand tons of earth had been removed from the southwest corner of the Noble Sanctuary. Now Israel reacted with outrage. An archaeologist at Bar Ilan University demanded to know, “Would anyone in the civilized world agree if some bulldozers were working on the Acropolis in Athens or the Pantheon in Rome, particularly without any type of archeological supervision?” The director of the Waqf replied that all work “has been done under the close supervision of a team of professional Palestinian archaeologists . . . They have examined samples of the excavated dirt and found no structures, artifacts or archaeological remains from any era.” But the Israeli authorities placed an embargo on the Waqf, ordering them to stop all construction.

To this day the Haram is piled high with rubble and soil, which the Israeli authorities have decreed will remain there until Israeli archaeologists have been given access to sift through the evidence. The Waqf won’t let them anywhere near it. Again and again the Muslim authorities have obstructed Israeli archaeology around the Western Wall. It raises the question, doesn’t it, of what it is that Israel is trying to dig up—of what is buried under the Noble Sanctuary of the Dome of the Rock.

E
VERYONE KNOWS THE
answer. About halfway down the tunnel that runs along the side of the Kotel, there is a small cave furnished with religious books. “This is the holiest spot on the wall,” the guide whispers in the darkness. “You can say a prayer if you like. There was a rose garden here, whose petals were used to make the incense the priests of the Temple of the Jews used in their ceremonies. It was just behind this section of the Kotel that the Holy of Holies once stood. The room behind this wall was the dwelling place of the Shekinah.”

The Palestinians are convinced that the Israelis intend to restore the Temple of the Jews, and they point to a bewildering array of organizations established to that very end. The Yeshiva of the Crown of the Priests exists to conduct research into the rituals of the temple. The society of the Temple Mount Faithful raises funds for the reconstruction of the temple from fundamentalist Christians in the United States. The Temple Institute runs a museum in which all the ritual vestments of the temple are on display, waiting for the day when they can be put into use; they have been adorned with gems and jewelry collected from the devout by the Temple Women. Another group runs a rotational system to ensure that there will always be a rabbi standing by the entrance to the Temple Mount dressed in the white robes of an ancient Levite; and yet another meets to discuss the breeding of a perfectly red heifer, the sacrifice of which was considered by all the ancient texts of Judaism to be the highest form of offering. Every few years, these groups gather under the auspices of the Temple Lovers to discuss their research and to organize visits to the temple site. They dream of rebuilding the temple and of making it ready for the Shekinah, so that God may once more dwell among men.

This is not an innocent affair of restoration: unlike the Acropolis in Athens, the Temple Mount is not covered in obsolete ruins. The Temple of the Jews cannot be rebuilt unless the Dome of the Rock and the
Al-Aqsa
Mosque are demolished. That’s all part of the plan of the Temple Lovers. There have already been countless attempts to destroy the shrines of the Haram e-Sharif with mortar attacks, machinegun fire, and arson. It’s not just mindless aggression; some of the attacks have been deliberately encouraged by rabbis who mutter that,
in their observation of historical niceties, “the archeologists sold out to the enemy.” Leaflets handed out by activists are clear in their demands: “The time has come to do what should have been done a long time ago. Government of Israel, remove the Gentiles and the Arabs from the Temple Mount.”

The government of Israel officially condemns this sort of extremism and tells the Waqf that it has nothing to fear. The Waqf doesn’t believe it. Of all the assaults on the Haram e-Sharif, the most extreme was that committed by the government of Israel itself.

A
T DAWN ON
7 June 1967, the third day of the Six-Day War, the Israeli army invaded the Arab part of Jerusalem. By eleven o’clock the chief army rabbi, Shlomo Goren, was blowing the shofar at the Kotel. His young soldiers, exhausted and bloodstained, fell on the stones and wept. Then they went up to the door high in the ancient wall and forced it open. They found themselves in the Haram e-Sharif, standing before the Dome of the Rock; but to them it was the Temple Mount, the site of the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of the Shekinah. One young man later recalled: “I stood there in the place where the High Priest would enter once a year, barefoot after five plunges in the Mikveh [the ritual bath] . . . but I was shod, armed and helmeted, and I said to myself: this is how the conquering generation looks.”